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Paul C�zanne: Two Sketchbooks

To judge from the number of drawings he made of it, Pierre Puget's monumental Hercules Resting in the Louvre was Cézanne's favorite sculpture. There are two more copies in this sketchbook (see Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1987-53-56b, 1987-53-73b), one in Sketchbook I (see Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1987-53-23b), and fourteen elsewhere (Chappuis, Adrien. The Drawings of Paul Cézanne. 2 vols. Greenwich, Conn., 1973, nos. 575-76, 578, 999-1005, 1058-60, 1196). Yet fully half of these drawings, including all four in the Philadelphia sketchbooks, show the figure in a rear view where the club and lion skin that identify him as the mythological hero are not visible. What seems to have interested Cézanne most was the bulging muscles of the right arm, back, and thigh and the way they enclose the smaller muscles of the chest and stomach, forming a kind of frame around them- a visual motif that he extracts from the realistically modeled anatomy, as if it were a landscape rather than a human form. Theodore Reff, from Paul Cézanne: Two Sketchbooks (1989), p. 167.